Meat, poultry and fish processors have difficulty accurately filling boxes, bags or other containers with fixed quantities or counts of fresh, frozen or cooked products. Under filling a container can cause customer dissatisfaction and overfilling a container results in costly “give away” of expensive products. At present, most operations are manual in nature and involve utilizing operators to count the products and then fill the respective containers. Manual counting and filling has several disadvantages. For example, miscounts due to operator error occur. Manual counting and filling is labor intensive, resulting in a high cost per container and less than desired container filling rates.
Attempts have been made to automate the counting and filling process by utilizing electrical photoeye counting systems to count the products as they pass by on a moving conveyor belt. The process is initiated with operators filling the pockets of a moving, pocketed conveyor belt with a single product per pocket. Photoeyes, used in conjunction with a control system and located near the exit of the conveyor belt, are used to directly count the product in each pocket as they pass by. Once the desired count is achieved, the controller will cause the product coming off the exit of the conveyor to divert to a new package or container.
Several problems are associated with photoeye counting systems. The photoeye can be blocked by pieces of skin, loose breading, fat, water droplets or other by-products from meat. It is difficult to set up the photoeyes and an associated control system to consistently detect and count meat products that vary in size, shape, height and position within the pocket. Optimum container filling rates are not achieved, due to time allowed for the actuation of the product diverter and the container indexing device.